Groom’s Mum via Facebook: “Hi Simon, Daniel’s mum from Friday’s wedding, thank u for the wonderful photo of my parents dancing, could’ve knocked me over with a feather seeing that, haven’t seen dad up like that in a very long time.”
Me: “Hi Tracey, that was a pretty magical moment watching your parents dance, especially when I looked back over the photos from earlier in the day and noticed your dad uses a walker just to move around!”
Groom’s Mum: “Your observations about dad & his walker were exactly why I was so shocked to see him up, they do say music has magical powers :)”
This right here is exactly why wedding photography is important. Really cool stuff happens all the time at a wedding and having a good photographer who’s dialed into what’s happening and has the technical chops to capture it perfectly is an important way to preserve family history for generations to come.
Danielle and Daniel’s wedding is the first in my series of blog posts showing the whole wedding behind each of my entries in this year’s SA Professional Photography Awards (SAPPAs). The SAPPAs are the state awards and are a prelude to the APPAs (national awards) held later in the year, they are viewed in very high regard within the industry and competition is fierce. There are a bunch of different categories from Portrait to Commercial to Travel to Wedding and everything in between. Back in 2013 I was runner up in the Travel category but since then I’ve only entered Weddings and was chuffed to be a finalist (top 3) last year. You can enter up to 4 images in a category and these images are scored by a panel of judges, the aggregate score across the four images is used to determine the three finalist in each category and from there the photos are all re-assessed and a winner for each category is declared (along with an overall winner). Here is my entry from this wedding.
The system is not perfect, but on the whole it’s very robust and fair. My biggest concern, and I appreciate that there is no way around this so it’s not a real concern, is that for weddings four photos over the course of a year gives a potential bride or groom no actual indication about the consistency of the photographer’s work over the whole day and what they can reasonably expect from their wedding collection. To that end I will be blogging the entire wedding for each of my four entries, I think showing where these photos sit in the context of the whole day is a great way to show how I operate on the day and what else is captured.
